The Graduate
The Graduate, novel by American writer Charles Webb, that was published in 1963 and was adapted as a 1967 film. The film became an enduring classic and won its director an Academy Award.
The Graduate, Webb’s most successful novel, is so much eclipsed by the movie (starring Anne Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman) that it is worth recalling that most of its iconic moments come directly from Webb’s text. The advice to go into “plastics” does not, but the underwater diving-suit scene, Benjamin’s embarrassment at booking a hotel room for sex, the fact that Mrs. Robinson is not given a first name, and Benjamin fighting off Elaine’s parents and friends with a crucifix are all in the original. A mild attack on the values of the white American professional middle class of the early 1960s, The Graduate, in both forms, has become a much admired populist satire.
The Graduate tells the story of Benjamin, a recent college graduate and son of well-to-do parents who is not interested in following the life path his parents have planned for him but does not know what he wants to do instead. Mrs. Robinson, the wife of Benjamin’s father’s business partner, attempts to seduce him. Benjamin resists at first but eventually spends the summer having a clandestine affair with Mrs. Robinson. When their daughter, Elaine, returns from college, both Mr. Robinson and Benjamin’s parents urge him to date her, but Mrs. Robinson forbids him. Benjamin takes Elaine to a strip club and treats her rudely, but later decides that he does like her and salvages the situation.
When Benjamin goes to the Robinsons’ home to pick up Elaine for another date, Mrs. Robinson threatens to expose their affair to Elaine, and Benjamin responds by telling Elaine himself, prompting Elaine to immediately end the nascent relationship. However, with the passage of time, Benjamin decides to move to Berkeley, California, to be near Elaine after she has returned to the university. He learns that Elaine has a boyfriend, Carl, but he is nonetheless successful in persuading Elaine that he had not, as she thought, forced himself upon Mrs. Robinson but that Mrs. Robinson had instigated the relationship. Both Carl and Benjamin propose marriage to Elaine.
Mr. Robinson comes to Berkeley, where he tells Benjamin that he knows about the affair and will get divorced and has also left his business partnership with Benjamin’s father. He threatens to have Benjamin arrested if he persists in seeing Elaine, and he takes Elaine home with him. Elaine decides to marry Carl. Benjamin returns to his hometown and breaks into the Robinsons’ house in a vain attempt to find Elaine. He then returns to Berkeley, where he learns that Elaine and Carl’s wedding is taking place right at that moment in Santa Barbara. He races to the church there, having to go part of the way on foot after his car runs out of gas, and gets there just as the ceremony is ending. When Elaine sees him, she runs to him, and they flee the church and board a bus to an uncertain future.
As fiction, The Graduate is notable for its flat and understated but expressive prose and for the fact that it is written mostly in dialogue. Mrs. Robinson’s alcoholism and silence might signal psychosis, but do not; Benjamin’s post-university distress is short of existential dread; the malice of his parents and their friends is harmless in the face of true love. Written in the early 1960s, Webb’s satire provided an early taste of the social criticism on which the harder attitudes of the later 1960s were founded.